There are so many ways to reach customers, it’s raising the question; is email still a viable method of marketing?
What are the facts?
More than 78 trillion emails are sent every year, with numbers steadily on the rise. In the US, over 85% of adults send and read emails, and 78% of teenagers regularly use their email too. 99% of people check their email every day. This tells us that email is still very much alive across all age groups, confirming it as a great way to reach your audience.
Email is still the dominant communication tool for professionals. Following research from Adestra, customers prefer email communication from brands that they follow over other forms of communication such as social media, paid searches or organic searches. However, it has also been revealed that 53% of consumers feel that they receive too many irrelevant emails from various brands. Out of the 78 trillion emails sent each year, with 17.3% of them being classified as spam, it’s fairly easy to see why customers are being put off by getting the wrong sort of emails.
It’s also worth considering what the email marketers think, not just the consumers that receive the emails. There’s a huge amount of email newsletter software, and so marketers are somewhat spoilt for choice, however DMA have reported that 38% of marketers consider only some of the emails that they send out to be relevant; and only 9% of marketers were confident that all emails sent out by their brand were relevant.
Email marketing ROI (return on investment) is something else that should be considered when discussing the success of email marketing. In a comparison between email and social media, email outperformed social media massively. The ROI of email marketing compared to direct mail was 28.5% higher, proving that email marketing is still very much alive.
There are a variety of benefits of email marketing; lots of consumers use email to find vouchers and discount codes, with 45% of people redeeming deals via mobile apps through email. Email has been able to stay relevant whilst other social media sites have fallen, making it more reliable and therefore more popular. Social media sites can shut down at any point but email doesn’t face that threat. Also, because you build your own email marketing lists, you own that list, meaning it won’t just be lost like it could be on social media if the platform you’re using folds. Email marketing has proved that it’s able to evolve to keep up, and so is a necessity for marketers wanting to stay relevant for their customers.
Another consideration is the development of smartphones. According to Adestra, 83.8% of people check their emails on their phones, so mobile email marketing is also growing. Making sure that your email marketing is mobile-phone friendly and is accessible on smartphones is key, as not doing so could lead to a loss in interacting especially by those who rely on mobiles to check emails.
It’s clear that email marketing isn’t dead; quite the opposite. It’s increasingly relevant and enables businesses to reach a variety of audiences via email marketing to develop your business.